Lloyd Evans

Filmic structures are always tricky on stage. David Mamet, an exception, can get away with writing long chains of scenes that last a couple of minutes each. But the theatre prefers to relax, to snuggle down, to linger slowly over every morsel of a many-layered spread. Encountering a screenplay on stage is like receiving a box of Milk Tray in a restaurant and being told it’s a 32-course meal. David Gooderson’s made-for-TV script concerns an Edwardian sex scandal featuring teenage boys and lauded grandees. Sir Hector MacDonald (aka Fighting Mac) was a crofter’s son who enlisted as an infantryman and reached the rank of major-general during a 20-year career. To rise so high without a private income was pretty rare in Britain’s gentry-loving military.

I wasn’t the only one desperate that Viva Forever! would be a blast. There were hundreds of us eager to leap to our feet and holler through the Spice Girls’ greatest hits as a band of teenage lookalikes led the tribute on stage. Didn’t happen, I’m afraid. The Spice Girls are not in this show. I’ll say that again. The Spice Girls are not in the Spice Girls musical. Jennifer Saunders has penned an arch and scabrous spoof of TV talent contests like Pop Idol and The X Factor. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Even celebrity culture has its epochs and phases, its stratifications and its correct chronology. The Spice Girls date from 1996. Pop Idol didn’t appear till five years later. In slebs-ville, that’s centuries.

Michael Grandage is homeless. After a near-faultless decade in charge of the Donmar Warehouse, he now reinvents himself as a roving thesp, a buskined vagabond, a theatrical mendicant wandering the byways and the turnpike lanes and ushering his troupe of all-stars into any pen that will accommodate them. It’s a medieval conception. The strolling players. His team of celebrity vagrants has taken a 15-month lease on the Noël Coward theatre where its residency kicks off with Privates on Parade, a 1977 play by Peter Nichols, examining life in an army concert party in Malaya in 1948. In shorthand, it’s the BBC sitcom It Ain’t Half Hot Mum  without the spitting bullies and the pouting misfits. Everything is tremendous fun.

Tough play, The Taming of the Shrew. Uniquely among Shakespeare’s comedies, it moves audiences to pity and fear. It’s a video-nasty in the garb of a marital farce, an uncomfortable romance whose closing reconciliation scene invariably draws lusty hisses from female play-goers as Kate renounces her autonomy and bows to the will of her brutal husband, Petruchio. Directors prefer to approach this squirm-inducing parade of sexual violence through the comforting distortions of a veil. Single-gender productions are popular. In a Gujurati version, Kate is portrayed as an immigrant and the title had been coyly changed to A Foolish Foreign Woman Comes to Her Senses. Cole Porter goes for the vegetarian option by taking us backstage during a tour of the play.

Are we barmy or what? Our mawkish obsession with the first world war demonstrates that we’re in the grip of a mass delusion: institutional sentimentality. The latest symptom of our death-mania is Nick Dear’s engaging play about the pastoral poet Edward Thomas, who was killed in action in 1917. Thomas began writing verse aged 36 at the suggestion of his American chum Robert Frost. We first meet the pair in a West Country croft in 1914. Frost is a smug, wily and sententious trustafarian who likes the idea of tilling the earth but stops short of actually tilling it himself. Thomas, a suicidal depressive, is incapable of showing warmth to his wife, Helen, and his three squealing nippers.

An orgy of navel-gazing on the South Bank where a national treasure is satirising the National Trust at the National Theatre. Alan Bennett sets his latest comedy in the drawing room of a crumbling Georgian mansion in South Yorkshire. Greedy speculators are queuing up to seize the house from its plucky owner, Lady Dorothy Stacpoole, a high-born hippie who spent her youth going to parties and modelling. Now aged 80 or 90, she’s ill equipped to outwit the circling vultures. Bennett is good at creating warm, believable women but with Lady Dorothy he simply regurgitates a stale theatrical burp: the beatnik with a bus pass. Writing plots has never been his strong point and he unwisely stuffs his story with fistfuls of loose threads. They poke out all over the place.

Uncle Vanya comes into the Vaudeville at an artful slouch. Lindsay Posner’s take on Chekhov’s story of bickering Russian sophisticates has an unusual visual style. In Britain we’re used to seeing Chekhov set in some fading Palladian mansion just outside Haslemere or Bath. Designer Christopher Oram has rummaged through the archives and discovered some hideously authentic stylings. He offers us a gloomy Siberian dacha, all cobwebby nooks and stacked timbers painted cowpat brown and carved with ornamental Asiatic doodles. This hulking coffin of a house emphasises the isolation and pinched misery of the play. The starry cast shine with fitful brilliance.